


Stories about Luna

by deepcreek



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aromantic, Asexuality Spectrum, Character Study, Gen, Multiverse theory as a narrative device, Non-Explicit Sex, Platonic Relationships, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 03:23:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5031865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepcreek/pseuds/deepcreek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There is a universe in which Luna Lovegood is eleven, or fifteen or seventeen, and she falls in love. There are very few universes like this." </p><p>Even in the universes where she doesn't fall in love, Luna Lovegood is doing fascinating things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stories about Luna

There is a universe in which Luna Lovegood is eleven, or fifteen or seventeen, and she falls in love. There are very few universes like this. She looks up after the final battle at Hogwarts and sees Neville tending to the wounded as diligently as she, and in several of these universes she has a realization, which is: this is not a terribly good time to fall in love with somebody. Sometimes she decides, on having this realization, to fall out of love with him again, and in some cases this is effective. There is one case where they temporarily relocate to Hogsmeade (they can still smell the burnt stone and flesh and fear, it is not a particularly effective location for escaping the war, particularly because it is downwind of the castle) and realize that many of the people back there have not experienced loss before as they have. In most cases, however, they found the support groups while sitting on a bench in the Great Hall, Luna swinging her feet at 75 beats per minute and Neville tracing a finger along the grain of the student-stained pine boards, looking out into nothing in particular next to each other.

In most of the universes like this, neither of them ever falls in love.

If Luna Lovegood falls in love, she does not paint friends◦friends◦friends on the ceiling of her bedroom. If she falls in love, then other people keep her company through the long, lonely summers, some of whom do not need to be painted to be present in that garret room each night. The feeling of gazing up at her work and realizing she has created an accounting of important people that is absolutely true (and no one ever gets Ginny absolutely true, besides this painting she has done here)—that feeling is given to her in the moment just before her plane touches down, at the first book signing where a six year old tells her he wants to grow up to do what she does, in a small stone church on the Isle of Skye. But it is not precisely the same feeling, naturally. No person feels exactly the same feeling twice, and this rule applies across universes as well as across time.

If Luna Lovegood marries Rolf Scamander, it is never because she has fallen in love with him. It is because he understands, and because authorities have more trouble denying the visa of a married couple on honeymoon (after honeymoon after honeymoon…) than that of a pair of conspiracy theorists poking around for mythical beasts. Sometimes Rolf brings someone home for sex or conversation, and Luna does not insert herself into these encounters unless they are particularly interesting. But they always sleep in the same bed, so that there is someone to bounce ideas off of when they arrive at 3 AM. Besides, in most every universe, Luna gets chilly at night and Rolf needs to listen to someone else breathing in order to fall asleep.

There is a universe where a grad school roommate introduces Luna to the X Files, and she pulls out the notebook always in her back pocket halfway through the third episode. Then it’s Fringe, and a National Geographic documentary about a mummy that hasn’t decayed, and some other nonsense that puts odd self-produced shit on her Netflix recommendations. When Lizzie (the roommate) sneaks a peek at the notebook, she notices that most of the items on the lists Luna makes from these shows are crossed out. With annotations. 

“Which ones haven’t you eliminated?” she asks, and that’s how it really starts between them.

In universes where Luna grows up in a community with other children nearby (these sorts of worlds are, sadly, few and far between), she is very in demand as a babysitter until parents learn what she has been saying to her charges. When Luna uses the Internet, she is not very good at search terminology. And when she is pushed towards introspection, she prefers to redirect to the fantastic. 

But in the vast majority of the universes in which Luna Lovegood is alive—usually alive in a small, blonde form, not terribly good with reaching out to strangers or holding back from friends—her funeral overfills the tiny parish church in Ottery St Catchpole. The Aurors assigned to her case, exasperated by her late night gardening habits and that time that she broke a leg and it healed without her notifying anyone, watch carefully for desecrations of her grave site. They’re sure they’ll have to move it, just as they had to do with the Potter and Granger tombs. But day after day, the stone sits in its spot of sun, untouched by anything but the mundane (or as mundane as you get when half the visitors to your grave aren’t human). 

In this universe, and in many like it, Luna Lovegood does not ever fall in love with anyone. But she is loved◦loved◦loved.


End file.
